On the Theory of Multivariate Elliptically Contoured Distributions and Their Applications.

Abstract : In this paper, the multivariate elliptically contoured distributions which generalize the elliptically contoured distribution to the case of a matrix are defined and a special class of multivariate elliptically contoured distributions is studied in detail. For this class we obtain the distributions of the following statistics: correlation coefficients, multiple correlation coefficients, Hotelling's T2, sample covariance matrix, generalized variance, characteristic roots of the covariance matrix, quadratic forms, etc. Some multivariate statistical applications are discussed. (Author)